The Arts Community Alliance (TACA) named Dallas Children’s Theater as one of its 2017 beneficiaries for the Donna Wilhelm Family New Works Fund and Bowdon Family Foundation Artist Residency Fund. The theater will be one of three arts organizations to receive grants totaling $150,000.

Funds will be used by the local theater company to showcase “Yana Wana’s Legend of the Bluebonnet,” a co-production with Cara Mia Theatre, written by Roxanne Schroeder-Arce and María F. Rocha with music by Héctor Martínez Morales, choreography by Evelio Flores and directed by Robyn Flatt. It’s a story within a story when a young girl hear’s the tale of Yana, a youngster who goes on a quest to find water and save her people. It connects the modern day with our ancestral past through wildlife and bluebonnets.

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“I can’t tell you what it means to me to see DCT giving life to such an important play and topic for children and families. Every child (and person for that matter) deserves to have their ancestry and their personal story celebrated and recognized,” says Karen Travis, the Dallas Children’s Theater president. “This play and the conversations planned around it will definitely inspire such an appreciation between and among all of us. The entire board is grateful to TACA and Donna Wilhelm for supporting new works such as this, which honestly wouldn’t be possible without anchor funding, and I hope that everyone will try to make plans to see this powerful story next spring.”

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The TACA funds were established to develop new artistic works is North Texas. This year’s winners also include the Dallas Black Dance Theatre’s “Uncharted Territory: Body of Evidence,” and Dallas Theater Center’s “Penny Candy,” by Jonathan Norton. In its 50 years, TACA has distributed more than $28 million to 162 arts organizations.

Dallas is so incredibly fortunate to have this effective developer of confidence in children in Robyn Flatt’s Dallas Children’s Theater.

It has always been great, but when it was downtown, it was a bear to get the kids there. Now that it is so convenient in Lake Highlands, every parent has the opportunity to bestow supreme confidence in their child by offering them enrollment in the DTC’s classes.

Our son really benefitted from his classes there, and our friends, whose son has dyslexia and was told by their school’s college counselor that their son would never make it into an Ivy League school due to his reading challenge and because he was not a legacy saw their years of devotion in taking their son from North Richardson to the downtown DTC rewarded when he won a full ride to Yale University for his drama competence.

It is tough for anyone to get a job in the acting field. That said, the confidence a child develops from learning how to perform correctly on stage at the DTC will help him/her have the confidence to succeed for life.

Our friends’s son later made Law Review when he was at Harvard Law School.

Robyn Flatt’s superlative Dallas Children’s Theater is a tremendous resource to assist parents in developing their children to succeed in life.